This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Fr. Robert Phelps, O.F.M. Cap.
St. Francis Speaks
“Signore, it’s no less for me to
Grace plaster-cast backyard birdbaths than,
Unfettered, to fly in the sky like a hawk.
Freed by my Lady Poverty, I saw the
Creator’s possibilities all round me.
My sisters, the birds, they understood,
Not in their song, but in their flight, that
We’re called all to an aerial brotherhood.”
Fr. Robert Phelps, O.F.M. Cap. has been a Capuchin friar for 63 years and a priest for almost 55. He served for 26 years in the territory of Guam in the Western Pacific and 14 years in Hawaii. He began to write creatively when on a private retreat in a rain forest near Lahaina, Maui, in 1991. He has one full-length book of poems, In the Hug of a Sun that has Stopped, published by Lion Autumn Music Co.; two chapbooks, Ever, and Point of View, published by Finishing Line Press; and one e-book, Incessancy, published by Book Baby. He lives in a community of friars in Beacon, New York.
